The English & Foreign Languages University is home to a pack of fine dogs, they keep us company, make us happy, give us love, and every once again are agonizing too.

There is a whole gang of committed students who take care of this fine dog pack, feed them (sometimes even Biryani!), love them, take them to the vet when needed.

One evening, we decided we needed to do a little more to keep these dogs healthy. So began scheming the idea of the Doggie Vaccinathon on EFLU campus. First order of business was finding a vet who visit our campus and spend an afternoon with us – Dr. Mirza Taher Ali Baig kindly agreed to vaccinate our dogs. He only charged us the cost of the meds, so nicely it became somewhat affordable.

On August 24th we set forth and rope in hand to hold the doggies in situ while Dr. Baig walked from place to place vaccinating the dogs.

We managed to vaccinate all the dogs that we collectively took care. Here are just a few photographs, we were more busy rounding up the doggies than taking photos!

I had a most wonderful time at SXSW this year. It was a phenomenal being surrounded with so much buzz and intelligence. I realize I made a huge mistake by showing up on Sunday afternoon, damn it .. the sessions on Friday & Saturday were awesome.

Top aha ideas

Detailed wireframes are dead. Instead lo-fi wireframe and move to mockup/prototype stage. This was a view that was shared by many of the sessions

Process

Step 2: Whole bunch of ideation up front – many ideas to solve the problem

in your gut, what is your favorite/most viable. Trusting your gut on a disparate team

advance this

identify & solve

focus on: architecture, interaction

Step 3: Build

Expedient technology is used to stand up the model as rapidly as possibly. Very different than wireframing/prototyping.

Throw hardware on it, right poor code, get it in front of the customer asap

Step 4: Show

Put the simulation in front of customer and use it for storytelling

Generative Whiteboarding – then pick a single viable. (very similar to the 1up concept)

Flipping through a virtualizations is so much more relevant for stakeholders, esp. for hardware.

Index of the vision, but tell them it’s fake! Blue sky factor – maybe it will be 5 years in the future.

Making

Making is designing.. no more design then make! So say the folks at Frog Design.

Fragmentation in technology also becomes a design issue. Designing for multiple devices, one learns just making & doing.

Have the engineering team do design concepts early on.

4 integrities: perceptual, technical viability, logical, economic.

Never underestimate the smallest prototype in someones hands vs. vast volumes of paper.

Bring the engineers into the process, don’t have them siloed. If you can show them you got to the 10% of what you want to get to, then engineerings will trust the design more and they will work toward you.

Flip your engineering team from the guy who protects the requirement to the guy who enables the designer.

Innovation

There was a quad chart here.. didn’t have time to re-do it.. but imagine it!

If you can’t do story telling, go more fact based. “There are 100s, 1000s of people who are trying to do this, but “They come back 3 times”, “partnerships with..”, “our social & facebook connectors allow us to increase the customer base x times”

Don’t make blanket statements.. like “We all know Amy”, instead say “I know Amy and this is her problem”. Don’t use canned users. * * Also only need to give a name if you need to reference the person later in your pitch.

Find a good analogy that can really shortcut the entire setup process for you.

If you have a good background, i.e. I previously founded xyz company which did this – and sold it here. Allows you to look like the expert without saying you are the expert.

Try positive spin – don’t ever doubt that someone in your audience likes or uses the thing that you diss.

Two different types of pitches

different between the in front of a large audience – to customer or more detailed in front of an angel investor